If you don’t plan your content strategy, you could be setting up your email marketing efforts to fail.
Without a course of action and the right approach, you’ll be relying on guesswork and manual methods, which can hinder your campaigns’ success.
However, it can take more than knowing the secrets behind the most successful newsletters to solidify your email marketing content strategy and get excellent returns.
You’ll need to have a solid content strategy to guide your email marketing efforts, helping you run successful campaigns.
Start with these four tips below.
1. Determine your target audience
Not identifying your ideal audience—contacts who are likely to want, need, or be interested in your email content and offers—can lead to wasted efforts and resources.
After all, without a target, you’re only aiming and firing at random people—a lot of whom could not care less and can’t be bothered to open your emails.
You’ll lose opportunities to connect with and engage the right people, lowering your chances of building strong customer relationships and, in turn, getting more conversions and sales.
Know your target audience to help inform and shape your email content strategy.
Create personas of your ideal customers. Use HubSpot’s MakeMyPersona tool to generate customizable personas you can easily share with team members.
You can set your ideal customer persona’s demographic traits, job and industry, preferred communication channels, the social media channels often used, and others.
You’ll get a good picture of whom you should create your email content for, including the kind of content that would entice your target audience to respond and act on your offers.
Utilize robust user tracking software with website visitor monitoring features to better understand your prospects’ activities on your site. You can leverage the information and insights to help determine your target audience.
2. Create audience groups
Drill down further on your target audience by segmenting them based on similar characteristics, demographics, interests, etc.
It can help ensure you send the most relevant content to the right audience, allowing you to target them better.
Some of your audience segments can include:
- Users who opened but didn’t click your email content. Create an audience group of people who opened your emails but didn’t click your internal links or Calls-to-Action (CTAs).
These subscribers were likely interested enough to open your email but need to see more value before you can convince them to act on your offers.
- Users sharing similar demographic data. Grouping your contacts based on demographic data allows you to send personalized content.
For example, you could offer subscribers who have birthdays in May special discounts for the month.
- Signup source. Segmenting your audiences based on where they signed up makes it easier to tailor your campaigns to your contacts’ preferences and needs.
For instance, you can send a series of emails highlighting tutorials on how to buy SEO articles and other features for users who signed up via your landing page. It’s one way of providing valuable email content to the right people at the best time.
Use handy customer database software to store, track, and manage client information that you can easily leverage to help determine your audience segments.
You can also leverage email marketing tools such as Omnisend to create audience segments and run your campaigns efficiently.
Image source: omnisend.com.
3. Develop email content writing best practices
Your email content and messaging can make or break your campaigns.
That is why it’s critical to set guidelines to help you write compelling content, from newsletters to the best welcome emails, to engage your audiences effectively and drive conversions.
Develop email content writing best practices for the following.
- Email subject lines. Ensure your subject lines are engaging and entice people into opening your emails by addressing the reader directly, including action words, and making them short, catchy, and unique.
Beauty brand Glossier’s email subject line below is a good example of a catchy and engaging subject line that invites subscribers to click and open the message.
- Email body. Make sure your emails are catchy and clear enough to capture your reader’s attention while getting your message across.
For instance, you can hook in your subscribers with an engaging opening line followed by clear and descriptive content. It helps convey your message while enticing your audiences into clicking on your CTA buttons.
- Email offers. Showcase the benefits over the features when sending offers via email marketing. It helps make your emails valuable for your readers while presenting a realistic view of your products or services.
It can also help your readers understand your product, service, or offer’s unique value, encouraging conversions.
4. Test your emails
Fine-tune your email strategy’s details to help you optimize their performance, meet your campaign goals, and get your expected returns
Perform A/B or split tests to explore and experiment with the following aspects of your email content and marketing initiatives.
- Subject line. Test long and short, humorous or straightforward, and other subject line variations to determine which one generates the most opens and click-throughs. You can also check whether using preheader text can catch your reader’s attention.
- Timing. Split test which times and days your subscribers are most likely to open and engage with your email.
- Sending frequency. Assess whether your audiences respond better to daily, bi-weekly, or weekly emails.
- Design. Perform A/B tests on your email layouts, images, CTA buttons, colors, designs, and other elements. It helps you determine the variations your subscribers respond more positively to and help drive engagement and click-throughs.
Include your email marketing messages in your content tracking strategy.
It helps you track, measure, and assess all content pieces and types within your digital marketing initiatives to tweak and improve their performance.
Start planning a winning email marketing strategy
Creating compelling email marketing content that engages your subscribers effectively and drives conversions can take time and effort before you start seeing significant results.
Get a good head start by learning from tried and tested tips on planning your content strategy and investing in reliable email marketing tools.
You’ll be nailing your email marketing in no time, allowing you to meet your campaign goals and get excellent returns.
